The Criterion Collection
Sep 26, 2013 — “It’s silly to choose ten, but okay!” wrote Donald Fagen, the American songwriter and musician best known as the cofounder and lead singer of Steely Dan, when presented with the task of picking his favorite titles in the Criterion Collection....
Nov 27, 2012 — Writer, director, and author Paul Feig is the director and producer behind the hit comedy Bridesmaids, as well as the creator of the beloved cult series Freaks and Geeks, a director and coexecutive producer of The Office, and the author...
Mar 13, 2012 — John Taylor is a member of the British rock group Duran Duran, which he founded in 1978 while at college in Birmingham, along with his fellow student Stephen “TinTin” Duffy and their neighborhood friend Nick Rhodes. When not on the...
Feb 22, 2012 — Oren Moverman, who appears as a visitor to the theater in Vanya on 42nd Street, is the cowriter and director of the 2010 Oscar-nominated The Messenger. He served as a screenwriter on I’m Not There, Married Life, and Jesus’ Son,...
Short Takes
Apr 18, 2011 — In this photograph of the Brattle Theatre circa 1953, you can see a sign that says “Opening Soon! Foreign Films.” The brilliant idea behind the sign belonged to Harvard classmates Cy Harvey and Bryant Haliday, without whom the Brattle Theatre...
May 13, 2010 — Samuel Beam is an American singer-songwriter (and former film studies professor!) better known by the stage name Iron and Wine. His last album was 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog, and a follow-up is in the works. When selecting his top ten...
Jun 19, 2009 — Forty-six years ago, Last Year at Marienbad opened in London. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet came over for the press screening, and I chatted to them in the lobby of the now defunct Cameo-Poly art house on London’s Upper Regent Street. Resnais...
Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...
Apr 6, 2009 — Paris is turning into Tativille starting tomorrow, April 8, until August 2, with the Cinémathèque française’s appropriately large-scale retrospective of the famously ambitious French filmmaking legend’s work, “Jacques Tati, deux temps, trois movements.” Curated by Stéphane Goudet and Macha Makeïeff,...
Feb 22, 2009 — “Let me have men about me that are fat.” —Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 2 Just as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe admired small, brave men who stick to their principles, I like—in the movies at least—heavyset, flamboyant types who walk...